Intel Core i5-4430 CPU LGA1150 Haswell Processor Review

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Intel Haswell Final Thoughts

The Core i5-4430 was not in the initial release of Haswell CPUs a few months ago, but it’s out now. As usual, Intel positions their processors by tweaking base and turbo clock speeds, adding or removing Hyper-Threading, and adjusting the cache size. In some cases more obscure features like virtualization support are involved, but in this case the 4430 is simply a slightly cut-down version of the range-topping 4770K. For the enthusiast market, the most important omission is that as a non-“K” series CPU, you cannot overclock the 4430– not even a little bit.

So, what does this mean in terms of benchmark performance? The chart below compares the scores of all the benchmarks I ran, with the 4770K scores normalized to 1.0 and the 4430 scores expressed as a fraction of that.

4770K

4430

4770K

4430

AIDA64 Queen

1.0

0.65

x264HD Pass 1

1.0

0.70

AIDA64 Photoworxx

1.0

1.08

x264HD Pass 2

1.0

0.76

AIDA64 AES

1.0

0.84

SPECviewperf Lightwave

1.0

0.82

AIDA64 ZLIB

1.0

0.69

SPECviewperf Maya

1.0

0.90

AIDA64 Hash

1.0

0.90

SPECviewperf TCVIS

1.0

0.82

CINEBENCH Single Core

1.0

0.80

SPECapc Lightwave Interactive

1.0

1.12

CINEBENCH Multi Core

1.0

0.56

SPECapc Lightwave Multitasking

1.0

0.79

Handbrake 0.96

1.0

0.75

SPECapc Lightwave Rendering

1.0

0.71

PCMark 7 PCMarks

1.0

0.96

Blender/Icetest

1.0

0.65

PCMArk 7 Productivity

1.0

0.84

POV-Ray

1.0

0.78

PCMArk 7 Creativity

1.0

1.01

Arcsoft Media Converter

1.0

0.91

PCMark 7 Computation

1.0

0.88

Average Performance Deficit

18%

The single-core performance of the 4430 is actually closed to that of the 4770K than you’d expect. However, the multi-core performance is much worse: the smaller cache and lack of Hyper-Threading really affect the scores in heavily threaded benchmarks like CINEBENCH Multi Core.

But once we add a high-end video card and start testing gaming performance, the performance difference vanishes:

4770K

4430

Heaven 4.0

1.0

0.99

3DMark 11 GT1

1.0

1.0

3DMark 11 GT2

1.0

1.0

3DMark 11 GT3

1.0

0.99

3DMark 11 GT4

1.0

1.0

Alien vs. Predator

1.0

1.0

Lost Planet

1.0

0.96

Metro 2033

1.0

1.05

Average Performance Deficit

1%

With only a barely-perceptible 1% average performance drop over these benchmarks, there’s no reason to spend the extra money for a 4770K if gaming is your main activity.